North Korea: A Funeral and a Coronation

At noon in North Korea today, trains and boats all sounded their horns at once—the contemporary equivalent, perhaps, of all the clocks striking thirteen. They were marking the funeral of Kim Jong-il, who, along with his father before him, had done so much to impoverish and kill so many of the country’s people, and whose son, Kim Jong-un, has now been anointed. Given that many North Koreans lack food, it seems almost churlish to point out that there are too few private cars, even in Pyongyang, the capital, for their horns to have made much noise. (The funeral cortege, on Wednesday, consisted of Lincoln Continentals from the nineteen-seventies, an element that, as the Times notes, caused some excitement among auto enthusiasts. It is a measure of the North’s isolation that the irony of an American car carrying Kim was, the paper writes, likely lost on Koreans.)

Kim Jong-un’s public role in all of this was to play dress-up—to look as much like his grandfather, whom he already resembles, by putting on the sort of black overcoat he was often painted wearing. Jong-un also cried for the crowds; they were crying, too, though what for is more of a mystery—their country, their pasts, the future that is more certain now and the lives they might risk if they don’t cry at all. The BBC’s John Simpson, who was in Seoul watching the television footage, noted that “you could sometimes see clearly that people were waiting for their cue to start weeping.” (Barbara Demick has described the way North Koreans compelled themselves to cry after Kim Il-sung’s death.)

There was a herald to announce Jong-un’s ascension: the speaker of the parliament, who asked that the people work to “solidify the monolithic leadership.” In that phrase, there is both a partial acknowledgment of reality—this is a dictatorship—and a masking of what observers can glimpse unfolding: a junta forming; a medieval family drama, complete with scheming uncle and dissolute brother; a military that needs to be fed first. (The Times noted the presence, in the current power configuration, of “a four-star general whose job is to monitor the allegiance of other generals.”) This could, one senses, get very ugly. Watching the funeral scenes, one wonders if whoever is running North Korea now is sorting out not whether this is a moment for reform, but whether show trials are more useful than silent purges.

And yet the ugliness of what happens now in Pyongyang’s palaces can hardly compare to the scenes in villages during the nineteen-nineties where whole families died. North Korea is out of those depths, but it’s a fragile and hungry country. Steve Coll, in a Daily Comment, wrote about the puzzle of what the West could do now about Korea. One piece of it was food aid.

A photograph that captures some of North Korea’s tragedy—it accompanied a 2003 piece by Philip Gourevitch—was shot by NASA. It shows the Korean peninsula at night, and you could see where the border was by the darkness on one side. It’s now past midnight in Pyongyang. The funeral, a few hours earlier, whatever power struggles it illuminated, had offered no beacon.

Amy Davidson is a New Yorker staff writer. She is a regular Comment contributor for the magazine and writes a Web column, in which she covers war, sports, and everything in between.